The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: Light and Electricity in Animal Representation

Jonathan Burt


This essay addresses the subject of animal representation via an historical account of the place of the animal in visual culture. It emphasizes the relationship between the animal as a visual image and the technology that produces this image. It explores three examples in a period covering c.1895 to the 1930s, in Britain, that analyze the relations between animal representation, technology, and the public domain. These are film, zoo display, and slaughterhouse practice. The overall goal of the essay is to move away from emphasis on the textual, metaphorical animal, which reduces the animal to a mere icon, to achieve a more integrated view of the effects of the presence of the animals and the power of its imagery in human history.

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Video Dog Star: William Wegman, Aesthetic Agency, and the Animal in Experimental Video Art

Susan McHugh


The canine photographs, videos, and photographic narratives of artist William Wegman frame questions of animal aesthetic agency. Over the past 30 years, Wegman’s dog images shift in form and content in ways that reflect the artist’s increasing anxiety over his control of the art-making process once he becomes identified, in his own words, as “the dog photographer.” Wegman’s dog images claim unique cultural prominence, appearing regularly in fine art museums as well as on broadcast television. But, as Wegman comes to use these images to document his own transition from dog photographer to dog breeder, these texts also reflect increasing restrictions on what I term the “pack aesthetics,” or collaborative production of art and artistic agency, that distinguish some of the early pieces. Accounting for the correlations between multiple and mongrel dogs in Wegman’s experimental video work and exclusively Weimaraner-breed dogs with human bodies in his recent work in large-format Polaroid photography, this article explores how Wegman’s work with his “video dog star,” his first Weimaraner dog Man Ray, troubles the erasure of the animal in contemporary conceptions of artistic authority.
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Getting Close to Animals with Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

Robert McKay


Alice Walker’s novel suggests that the ability to use language, regarded in this article as equivalent to one sense of the word, "representation," separates or marks the fundamental difference between humans and animals. Although this indicates that representation creates a distance between humans and animals, the novel offers a way to bridge this gap in order that representation, in a second sense of speaking or advocating for animals can effectively occur. Importantly, the explicit context for this is Walker’s anti-oppressive politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I analyze the novel’s portrayal of characters that understand their lives, the past, and their relationships with animals by creating myths and stories, rather than via conventional written history. Through this, I show that, for Walker, this imaginative and creative understanding of worldviews other than the norm of western culture allows the distance that language insinuates between humans and animals to be removed. Creative, imaginative understanding, for Walker, allows humans to get close to animals.
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Cultured Killers: Creating and Representing Foxhounds

Gary Marvin


This article concerns the related ideas of "presentation" and "representation" with regard to animals and suggests that the prefix "re" indicates a directing agent with its own concerns about the nature and status of animal presence. It further suggests that the representation of animals is perhaps always an expression of human concerns, desires, and imaginings. As with other domesticated nonhuman animals, the foxhounds are not present in the world to fulfill their own purposes but there to fulfill these human desires and imaginings and are celebrated as the realization of a complex engagement of humans with the world of animals. The foxhound is central to English foxhunting and is given cultural meaning because of this context. The article offers a close anthropological interpretation of the production of this animal- a complex, cultural creation based on a canine form.
 

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